Trade
Unionists reacted angrily yesterday to proposals from the Institute of
Directors to further attack and undermine trade union rights and the
ability of working people to fight back against the barrage of attacks
coming from the employer and the government.
Rob
Williams,
National Shop Stewards Network vice-chair and convenor of its
anti-cuts committee said:
"This
is clearly an attempt to prevent working-people legitimately using
their hard won democratic rights to defend their jobs, terms &
conditions and pensions from the ConDem's intention to make us pay for
the bankers' crisis. This at a time when the existing laws are already
being used by employers to stop industrial action on the most spurious
grounds.
Workers will be well aware of the hypocrisy of the government when
they talk about democracy abroad at the same time that they are
enabling a bosses' dictatorship at home. However, we in the NSSN have
every confidence that British workers will prove just as able as their
counterparts in the Middle East at fighting oppression."
Martin Powell-Davies,
National Union of Teachers NEC member said:
�The
IoD have no interest in the economy, just in boosting their profits at
our expense. They want to break the unions that have the power to stop
their cuts. We have to use that power.�
Alex
Gordon,
Rail, Maritime & Transport union President, said:
�The
IoD has demanded the government boost private firms' profits by
releasing green belt land for development and abolishing employment
rights.
IoD wants the government to end collective pay bargaining in the NHS
and education and scrap the right to request time off for training,
which it calls red tape.
UK
firms have been feather-bedded for over 25 years by what Tony Blair
acclaimed as "the most restrictive anti-union laws in the western
world" - effectively a subsidy to bad employers.
Despite laws, which make it easy to rip off and sack workers in
Britain and increasingly hard for unions to take lawful industrial
action to defend them, the body representing Britain's private bosses
now wants to smash national collective bargaining in the NHS and
education to allow privateers to feast on our public services.
The IoD might be dismissed as living in �a Thatcherite fantasy world�,
however reorganisation of the NHS into Primary Care Trusts, by the
last Labour government makes abolition of national bargaining an
achievable ambition for a crisis-ridden ConDem government seeking to
appease big-business critics as the predicted double-dip recession
starts to bite.
Any attack on national bargaining must be resisted by massive
coordinated strike action. Failure to do so will embolden the
privatisation lobby, leading to regional pay and a downward spiral of
competition between workers in health and education.�
The
National Shop Stewards Network is a rank-and-file trade union body,
launched in 2007 by the RMT and also sponsored by the PCS, CWU, POA
and NUM. For more information, visit
www.shopstewards.net.
